


All the Greens of June

by Muccamukk



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: (not the fun kind), Asphyxiation, Canon Era, Drowning, Episode: s01e02 Day of Days, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, M/M, Pining, Sharing a foxhole, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 15:05:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15932891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Lew's jump into Normandy brings disaster the second he touches down. As the invasion continues, and Lew struggles on, the memory of dark water clings to him.





	All the Greens of June

**Author's Note:**

> Written for h/c bingo square "Drowning." Lew doesn't actually drown (in this fic he lives! See, this is cheerful! I can write cheerful!), but it comes close, and there are lots of references to other drowned paratroopers (an unfortunately common fate for the airborne on D-Day). This is my usual muddle of book canon, show canon, and haphazard research, so hopefully it all hangs together.
> 
> Title from the case/lang/veirs song, and only used a little ironically. (Bloody HBO colour filters.)
> 
> I may do a follow up from Dick's PoV set during episode three.

Lew was in the middle of his stick, and jumping wasn't as much a choice as a reaction. He leaped out the door, counted to four one thousands, and checked his risers. It was all good. Everything was fine. He wasn't surrounded by German flack and burning planes. He wasn't headed for a tree, the outline of the branches lit in yellow and red. He yanked on his left riser and drifted away towards a patch of darkness that looked empty. Empty of muzzle flashes, and empty of the lights laid out by the pathfinders to indicate the drop zones. When they hit ground, no one was going to know where they fuck they were, Lew least of all.

He didn't realise how screwed he was until his boots touched down with a splash and he understood that he'd missed land and hit some kind of lake or mire or...

Lew's feet hit bottom, shot out from under him, and his body pitched forward, a hundred pounds of gear driving his face into the water. His Mae West did nothing to slow his plunge into the cold murky water. Lew flailed, knowing his had seconds. His right hand tangled in something, and the parachute settled on top of him, wiping the world from dark to utterly black. Lew hadn't had time to take a breath, and his heart was racing, burning through the little air he had left. There was no time. The clip on his harness had jammed he pushed at it, then yanked at it then pushed again, all left handed. It was stuck. He was stuck. He groped down his leg until he found his boot knife, and he slashed at the suspension lines until he got his right hand free. His gloves made his movements clumsy, but he didn't have time to pull them off. The buckle was still jammed. 

His lungs were burning, and he was going to have to breath soon. If he inhaled, he was going to die in the mud in Normandy without even standing on enemy soil, and he'd never see Dick Winters again. If he didn't inhale, the same damn thing was going to happen.

Priorities: Lew needed to get his head out of the water. If he couldn't turn over, could he find the edge and haul himself out? He groped forward but found nothing but water and mud. He had to turn over then, turn over and get his head out of the damn water. Christ, he was going to drown if he didn't get his fucking act together. If this were a sailboat, he'd know what to do. If Dick were here...

Dick was miles away, or dead already. Lew had to do this on his own. No one was going to help him. He had a knife, but what to cut first? The harness straps were thick and heavy. He sawed through one at his shoulder and shrugged out of it, sliding the pack strap after it, then twisted his body against the weight driving him down into the mud. The silk canopy caught at him, dragging every move into slow motion, and he didn't have goddamn time to deal with this shit.

Lew curled his knees forward sinking them deep into the mud. The weight of his body pushing down against his knees drove the last scraps air out of his lungs. If he had seconds before he needed to breathe, he was a luckier son of a bitch than he'd ever been before. Lew sawed at the other shoulder strap. It snapped; he shrugged off the pack, and pushed up with all his strength, even as the blood pounding through his head started to turn the blackness crimson.

He came up to a face full of wet silk, and choked and failed to get any air at all. Scrabbling at the silk didn't find an edge and he couldn't seem to get his knife hand to work with his right to get a hold of it long enough to cut through. He fell forward again, and knew that that was that. Lewis Nixon had jumped into France, against all odds, and then in line with all odds he'd drowned in three feet of water before he'd done a gaddamn thing.

The blood roared past his ears too loud to think. Lew jerked and flailed against the parachute, desperately trying to find anything to hold onto, even an edge of silk to pull away from his face. His muscles weren't moving the way he wanted them to. Lew screamed silently, airlessly, into the water and pitched himself sideways and backwards with every atom of strength he still had in him.

He breached half sideways twisting against the silk, and by some miracle he didn't understand and certainly didn't deserve, found the edge of the silk and ripped it away from his face.

Lew's gear started to pull him back down into the water. His fingers worked at buckles and clasps, shedding equipment as he struggled to find his feet. His musette bag fell away and at last he caught his balance. He still had his pistol, but would have to find an M1. A shiver racked his body, and Lew knew he had to get moving, the cold and shock of almost drowning was making him stupid. He wanted to just kneel in the mire and suck in lungfuls of damp air forever.

His ears popped, and the sounds of the war flooded back in from every side: eighty eights and plane engines and explosions. Far in the distance, he could hear the sound of bells. Where was Dick? Somewhere out there in all that, or had he been shot down? Could he have drowned too? Lew felt stupid for thinking that he would instinctively know, but he did. Surely he would be able to feel that kind of loss, and if he hadn't , then Dick Winters was doing just fine.

Lew stood and turned around, trying to get his bearings. He groped around for his pack but it had either slid down into the mud or was too tangled in the chute to recover. He had lost his map case, his rifle, his extra ammo, his rations, and a hundred other things the 101st had strapped to him before they figured he was ready to go. He had his side arm (wet), four granades (same), the contents of his pockets, and a clear memory of the sand tables in his head. If he could find a landmark, he could figure out how far off course he'd jumped and try to find the others. His stick couldn't be that far, and they all couldn't have lost their gear, could they? Lew had a vision of them all wandering in circles in the dark, missing each other every time.

Suddenly, amber lights flared to life away to his left, on the other side of the pond, maybe six hundred yards away. Lew recognised U.S. Army emergency lighting high in the branches of a tree. Someone had risked making a new rendezvous point. Lew staggered to dry ground, falling forward onto his hands and knees as his boot caught on a sunken branch and forcing himself upright again. The trick was to keep moving forward, he decided. That was what had gotten through training, and it would get him through here. Now he even knew which way forward was.

He still didn't feel like he was breathing right, but pushed that out of his mind and crouched as he worked his way towards the lights. He had his cricket at least, and chirped out the call when he thought he was close enough. Not that he really needed to. He could make out the silhouette of Captain Hester, the battalion S3, against the orange lights. Hester chirped back, and they shook hands.

Lew hadn't been sure he'd ever touch another living soul again, and was incomparably grateful for the offered handshake over a salute.

"You're soaking wet, Nix," was the first thing out of Hester's mouth.

"Landed in a pond," Lew said. "Lost most of my gear. Sorry, sir."

"You okay?"

Was Lew? He didn't know. It didn't matter now. "Yes, sir."

They heard another cricket and Hester replied. Two more men filtered in, and three more after that, all drawn by the lights. Hester greeted each one as warmly as he had Lew.

"Nixon," Hester said when they had about a platoon's worth of men, "I need to figure out where the hell we are, can you do that?"

"Yes, sir," Lew said, and set off into the night again. He was still cold and wet and didn't have a rifle, but he had the airborne at his back now, and there was work to be done.

* * *

By the time they worked forward towards Le Grand Chemin, they'd picked up two hundred men, including Lieutenant Colonel Strayer, but only two or three troopers from E Company. No Dick, not even Meehan. They did find Lieutenant Compton and a handful of his stick, but he said his plane had been badly shot up on the way in, and he didn't know if it had made it back. He hadn't seen what happened to the others. Lew didn't ask about Dick. He was alive. He had to be. He just hadn't made it in yet.

Strayer sent Lew out to assess the roads towards Utah Beach, and Lew spent a few hours on his belly in the mud, noting German emplacements and working with Hester to direct fire on them.

"What about those eighty-eights up at the farm?" Lew asked an hour in.

"Oh, Winters is looking after them," Hester said. "Strayer sent him with what we've found of Easy."

"Winters?" The name didn't quite make sense in Lew's head. "Dick Winters?"

"Know any other Winters in E Company?" Hester asked. He picked up his binoculars and peered forward. "He came in about half an hour after we did with about ten men from Easy and a couple All Americans."

"Oh." Lew couldn't think of anything else to say. It was weird knowing for sure what he'd been telling himself all night. It should be relief. It damn well should be a joy. Lew couldn't tell what he felt. He picked up his own binos—lifted, like his rifle, off the corpse of a dead officer they'd found face down in another pond, drowned in three inches of water—and looked at the beach. "Think I could get through to meet up with 4th Infantry's Shermans?"

Hester looked at the road, then at the armada off shore, and finally at Lew. "We sure could use them up here," he said. "Take a squad from F Company and see what you can do."

"Yes, sir," Lew said, and set off to find Dick a Welcome to France present.

* * *

Dick had always been a hard man to shop for, but he appreciated a couple tanks, and Lew appreciated getting to see him mud-smeared and alive, and more so clasping hands with him as he pulled Dick up onto the Sherman. His grip was strong and sure as always, and Lew would bet money that Dick hadn't managed to lose his rifle and nearly die minutes after he landed.

Lew made sure that he kept tabs on Dick for the rest of the day. Now that Second Battalion actually had a staff, Lew spent most of his time in their makeshift command post. No one had seen Meehan, so keeping track of Dick was mostly a matter of knowing where E Company was, which happily fell under a battalion S2's job description. Strayer and Hester mostly kept Lew too busy to stop and think anyway.

Later, when they'd bunked down in another half-abandoned French village, Lew went out into the night to find Dick. He didn't even clearly know why, mostly he just wanted to talk to someone who wasn't going to give him an order or expect him to give one. He knew that he couldn't hope for any kind of closeness, not here, but he wanted to hear Dick's voice, and feel reassured that no matter what blood and horror the day had brought, Dick Winters was still all right.

But Dick was upset, shaken by his first taste of real command and the loss of his men, and wanted time to pull into himself. He stood apart from his men, and apart from Lew, and no amount of reassurance and congratulation Lew tried to offer seemed to make a dent in that. In the end, Dick walked away into the night, and Lew went back to where the other staff officers were bunking.

They were all sleeping on the floor of half-ruined house, still in their uniforms. One or two men had taken their boots off, but Lew didn't have the energy to do more than unbuckle his rifle, pistol and musette bag. He hadn't slept since that cat nap before H-Hour, twenty-four hours ago, and he was still soaked through and shivering every time he stopped moving. Lew curled up around his map case and put his back to Strayer's back, just close enough to absorb some of his body heat. Strayer murmured in his sleep, and Lew tried not to think about how nice it would be to curl up with Dick right now.

They'd tented together enough times that Lew knew Dick was an octopus in his sleep, all long limbs and clinging. He'd always wake up chagrined to have taken over Lew's side of the tent, and Lew would always pretend that he minded, while coming up with his next excuse for a battalion S2 and a company XO to need to be on an exercise together. So far Lew's morning wood—and Dick's for that matter—had fallen under the excuse of things that happened when men kept close company and been quietly ignored. Dick was a good friend, and either hadn't noticed the torch Lew was carrying or was politely pretending not to notice. Whichever it was, Lew would take it, but he wished to God that Dick was here now. He wondered where he was sleeping, if he was sleeping at all.

He was probably personally tucking in every damn one of his troopers. Every one that was still alive, anyway.

Lew lifted his head long enough to take a swig of Calvados. It wasn't aged long enough and burned down his throat like paint thinner, but two slugs was enough to knock him out.

* * *

There was nothing but blackness on every side of him, blackness and flashes of red as the lack of oxygen started doing something to his eyes. His eyes were open, but he couldn't see anything through the water, and the water never ended. Lew tired to swim. He was a good swimmer. His arms were tangled in his lines, and the more he thrashed, the closer the chute wrapped around him. He was bundled tight as a mummy, and he was absolutely certain that he was dead.

Lew's eyes snapped open. It was dark, but not the absolute blackness of the muddy water. The faint grew of pre-dawn slipped through the blown out windows, and he could hear trucks rumbling. He could breathe. He was panting in great gasps of air loudly enough for Strayer to stir and mutter, "Land's sake, Nixon," while still mostly asleep. Lew's skivvies were still wet, but that was the worst of it. He was fine. It was just a dream.

Rubbing his face with his hands, Lew pushed himself up and took another swig of brandy. It helped him settle his breathing down enough to think straight. It was 0415, and he'd grabbed about four hours of sleep. That would about do. Lew shook Strayer awake and went to find the battalion CP and Captain Hester. If the situation reports from the night before were still at all accurate, they had a long hard day of fighting ahead of them, and Lew needed to help plan it.

Hester put Easy in front of the line, and Lew watched Dick lead them in combat all that day and most of the following night. When the firing stopped, Lew interrogated the prisoners Dick and the other company captains turned in, crawled through mud and decaying cow guts to verify reports, worked with Strayer and Hester on the lines of attack, and then did it all again.

They had a commandeered house the following night. It was in some shitty little French village that Lew hoped to forget the name of, but knew he never would. The town was probably less shitty and the inhabitants more friendly when the streets wasn't jammed with wounded and weary paratroopers and dead livestock. Lew knew he'd never forget the smell either.

When he closed his eyes he didn't see the dead soldiers, or the bewildered Garman teenagers in interrogation, or the lost look on his own men's faces, he saw the black water. It was the kind of dark he hadn't known existed before then, not even sailing at night so far out that he couldn't see the shore. It was the kind of black that came only with the end of all things.

Lew opened his eyes. His room had blackout curtains pulled down, but a torn thread of moonlight edged around one side of them. Lew stared at it and made himself take one breath and then another and then another. He wasn't in the water, darkness didn't mean water. He didn't need a fucking light on to prove to himself that he wasn't drowning. He'd been under for less than two minutes, and this was incredibly stupid.

He knocked back an inch of Calvados and tried again. Again his throat closed, and he felt pulled under. The room was too quiet, and too dark. He could turn his flashlight on, but the battery wouldn't last, and he didn't have a candle. His options, it seemed, were to stare at the gap between the curtain and the window frame until moonset, and them presumably lose his mind, or find somewhere else to sleep.

Lew got up and buckled on his pistol and musette bag, then pulled on his boots. Easy was bunked down in foxholes in front of the town, holding the battalion's centre and protecting HQ.

Dick had a shallow foxhole a little back from the line, on high enough ground that it was only somewhat muddy and not a total swamp. He was sitting with his back to one wall, and his long legs pulled up in front of him so that he could rest his arms on his knees. He wasn't sleeping, which was about what Lew had figured. The bugs were bad—mosquitoes breading like mad in the flooded fields and swamps—and as Lew approached, he saw Dick swat irritably at his neck, but otherwise remain stone-carved in his stillness.

"Thought I'd see what the situation on the line was," Lew said as he slipped down beside Dick.

"Same as my last report," Dick answered, but he shifted over to make a little more room for Lew. They sat hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. "Not expecting much. Unless we are?"

Lew'd thought he'd love how everyone would look at him for answers after he'd wrangled his promotion to S2, and he had, until they'd hit real combat. "Not that I've heard," he said. "I, uh, came from my billet, not HQ."

"Oh?" Dick asked, then said, "Oh!" in a completely different tone. He shuffled so that his shoulder pressed more firmly against Lew's. "Yeah, me neither."

They didn't say anything for a while after that. Lew slapped at a mosquito that cut right through the sleeve of his ODs, and Dick stretched his legs out a bit so he could tip his head against the back of the foxhole. They both still had their helmets on, and Lew figured he was about to get used to sleeping in the damn thing. The whole place reeked of sour water, piss and rotting flesh.

"I thought you said you liked France," Dick said finally.

"I said I liked Paris," Lew answered. He'd just about been drifting off. Right now, staring out at the silver and shadows of the swamp in the moonlight with his best friend at his shoulder felt safer than any bed with four walls and a roof did. "Had actually given Normandy a pass until now. Not sure I'd add it to the tour. Bordeaux's swell. We should have invaded there."

"I want to come back." Dick's voice was soft, and Lew knew he was in some far off and dreamy post-war life, one that he seemed to be able to imagine, and Lew could not. "I want to see this land when it's growing, not trampled into the mud. This is good land."

Lew almost promised to take him, like he'd promised Chicago in a fit of intoxicated affection on what at turned out to be D-Day minus one, but how the hell would that work? Lew wanted to say that he'd come back too, but he couldn't picture it, and he couldn't picture home either. He didn't know where home was. New Jersey maybe, or Santa Barbara, or right here with Dick Winters at his side. "How was your jump?" he asked, changing the topic.

He could almost feel Dick grimace beside him, though they were both staring out at the line, not watching each other. "Lost the damn leg bag as soon as I got out the door and landed without a weapon," he said, making Lew lose a bet with himself. "Didn't get my hands on a rifle for a couple hours."

"Were you alone?" Lew asked. He didn't want to think of Dick lost and by himself in the dark with nothing but a boot knife.

"No," Dick said. "Or not for long. I found another trooper after a few minutes. John Hall, actually, who died at Brécourt, and then Lipton and some others after that."

"Right," Lew said, remembering how Hester had said he'd come in with a squad made up from two divisions.

"What about you?" Dick asked. "They didn't stick battalion staff with the leg bags, did they?"

"No," Lew said. "But I lost most of my gear in a swamp after I landed anyway, can't even blame that one on the Brits."

"Huh." Dick paused, thinking that over. "You all right?"

Lew snorted. "Only my pride, as usual."

"I saw troopers drowned in ankle-deep water," Dick said after another pause. "Too much damn weight."

"Yeah," Lew said. "That's how I got my replacement equipment."

Dick nodded. "Yeah," was all he said, an echo of Lew, but his voice made the word encompass the horror of looting their own men for weapons, how the dead had been a relief to find, and how that was the worst part of all. They hadn't imagined this, not either of them, not over years of training. Not even Sobel's cruelty and Sink's determined brutality had really prepared them.

Lew slumped down until his head was level with Dick's shoulder and pulled out a cigarette. He cupped his hands around the lighter to keep the drizzle out. Everything was still wet. Dick made a dark humming noise about the light, and Lew said, "The smoke'll help with the bugs."

"Think so?" Dick asked, in a tone that implied that he didn't.

"It'll make me feel better about them," Lew amended, and took a long pull. "Anyway, I heard you picked up all kinds of vices."

Dick laughed softly. "A man has one drink in his whole life..."

Lew felt like there was a cautioning proverb he should remember from prep school, something about the first taste of sin. Or maybe that was the Bread of Deceit. The headmaster that Sobel had resembled had been fond of the Book of Proverbs. Instead what he came up with was the old prohibition slogan: "Lips that have touched liquor," he said, "Shall... something. I didn't know it was possible to be this tired and still have your eyes open."

"Then sleep here," Dick said, his voice gentle and very fond. Lew could live without Dick's lips ever touching his, so long as he never lost that particular affection and tolerance that he seemed to hold for Lew and no other man in the army.

His back would hate him in the morning, but Lew figured he could indeed sleep here, tucked right up next to Dick, the moon lighting them both.

Dick shuffled down so that they lay shoulder to shoulder again, and when Lew looked sideways at him, he had his eyes closed, and his features composed like a funerary mask.

Lew closed his own eyes, and slept restlessly until dawn.

* * *

The next day, Lew got hauled up to Regiment, and dragged into planning the assault on Carentan. Dick mostly went on a hunt for his lost troopers. A handful turned up every few hours, either as living men or as dog tags. Lew tried to keep on top of the numbers, both for Dick's sake, and with the idea that knowing how many men one had to storm a village was a good idea. It was going to be a bastard of an attack, no matter how they did it, but no matter how they did it, it wouldn't be until the next day at the earliest.

Lew stayed up late waiting for the scouts to come in, and didn't get stood down until nearly midnight. He hesitated in front of Second Battalion's commandeered house. He was so tired his eyeballs hurt and his hands were shaking, but he didn't think he would sleep there.

He hadn't seen much of Dick since that morning, and he wanted to make sure he'd gotten through the day. Of course, someone would have told him if the acting commander of one of his companies was KIA, on the casualty list, or otherwise missing, but at some point on D-Day, Lew's ability to trust what he rationally knew to be true had crumbled. Dick was alive and well when Lew could see him. Lew was alive and breathing when he had his eyes open and a task in front of him.

"Hey, Nix." Dick materialised out of the the shadows next to Lew, all of a sudden standing close enough to brush shoulders. Lew really was out of it.

"Yeah?" Lew tried to think of what Dick could need right now. Everyone needed so many damn things, but Lew was intelligence, not operations, and Dick should be going to Hester.

Instead of offering the latest casualty update or wanting a briefing for the next day, Dick fussed with the strap of his M1, and didn't say anything.

"You okay?" Lew asked.

"Yeah," Dick said. "Fine." He didn't move, and Lew found that he couldn't either, like they'd locked into each other without noticing and now they were both bound to the spot.

Lew looked sideways at Dick, not seeing a lot more than his profile in the moonlight. His lips were parted, and his shoulders hunched, and Lew could almost taste the edge of something unspoken between them, but it wasn't close enough to actually work out. Moments like this, Lew looked up at Dick and had to wonder what the hell he was thinking, which always led to wondering what it would it would feel like to kiss him. Lew had imagined that kiss in a thousand quiet moments over their years of training together. He'd always had either too much sense or too little courage to actually ask if that was what Dick wanted, too. "Turns out, I was just about to look for you," Lew said.

"Oh?" Dick was looking right back at him. If he were a girl, this would be a come on, but Lew didn't know if the man was aware of the signals he was sending half the time.

Lew was too tired for this game. Exhaustion was dragging him down, and he just wanted to go curl up in Dick's shitty foxhole with all its mosquitoes and catch a few hours of sleep. He didn't want to have to say why. He didn't want to have to keep playing Guess Who's a Queer, or keep risking pissing off his best friend. He pulled himself away from Dick and started towards Easy's section of the line. "You letting Harry run the place?" he asked.

Dick fell into step beside him. "Yup. Figure he can manage for an hour or so. I... uh, well, I needed to see you."

"Oh?" Lew asked, and then stopped because Dick had. They both had to step back from the muddy road as a deuce and a half rumbled by, lights extinguished. It would be carrying more men, or more guns, or more supplies. Lew could feel the U.S. Army pumping in this town like water into a pressure tank. Some time in the next few days, it would be released again, this time at the town in front of them. Maybe then he'd be able to fucking sleep.

"I..." Dick started, and then ground to a halt again. He stepped further back, into an alleyway that was shaded from the moonlight and out of sight of anyone who wasn't looking for trouble. Lew followed him in. "I couldn't sleep not knowing where you were," Dick whispered. "I know it's stupid, but..."

Lew closed his eyes and the world swayed around him. He felt like he'd fallen into a dream. The closeness in the dark, Dick saying exactly what he'd been thinking minutes before, the way blood pounded in his head. It was surreal, like one of those paintings his sister went mad for, all wrong angles and impossible skies. "It's not," he said, his throat dry. "Not more stupid than..." even with the pathway laid out clear in front of him, Lew couldn't finish that thought.

"Than wanting to kiss me," Dick finished for him. "I'm not blind, Nix."

They couldn't. Not even here in the shadows. They didn't dare. But Dick raised his gloved hand and pressed his fingertips to Lew's lips, just for half a second, just for long enough for Lew to moisten his lips against them. It was a little like a kiss.

"Yes," Lew agreed, his voice shaking. "Christ, Dick, I want..."

"Shh..." Dick's fingers were gone from Lew's lips, but they were still standing close in the alleyway, and Dick knew, sounded like he'd known for a while now, and he was still there. Maybe Lew really was dreaming. "I'll keep," Dick said gently.

"It won't," Lew said in a rush, feeling like he had one remaining breath to say everything that he should have told Dick years ago.. "I won't fucking keep. Tomorrow you're..."

"I know," Dick said, like it meant nothing that in the next two days Dick would be running into German fire while Lew literally stood back and watched him go. "It'll keep, Lew. I promise."

It was an insupportable, lunatic promise to make on the third day of an invasion, but Lew couldn't say that, so what he said instead was the secret he'd been holding close these last two nights. "I can't sleep alone right now. I can't handle the dark. I need you."

"Yeah," Dick said, in the same tone as he'd used when Lew had confessed to looting their own dead for a rifle and a map case. "All I have is a foxhole, but..."

"Best offer I've had all week," Lew answered quickly, and even in the dark Dick's teeth flashed as he smiled back at Lew. Maybe Dick knew something he didn't—had some deal with God—and he was right, and it would keep, and they'd both live long enough for Lew to find out what it was like to kiss him. That seemed wildly optimistic to Lew, bordering on naive, but Dick's word was enough to hold an entire company together through blood and smoke and battle. Dick could very nearly conjure soldiers out of the air, and make them follow him with a word, and that was without smiling at them.

And if Dick died the next day, or the day after that, or any time before the two of them could catch a truly private moment together, at least Lew could say that he'd gone knowing the truth, and that Lew had stayed at his side every night, and that they hadn't let each other drown.

"Let's go then," Lew said, and they turned back and walked together towards the line.


End file.
